The author writes as if he were the omniscient narrator of a novel, offering up assertions that are provocative but often conjectural. Barton Swaim reviews ‘Fire and Fury’ by Michael Wolff.
Inside the Trump White House” is thus in a class with Salman Rushdie’s “Satanic Verses”—by itself a forgettable book, certainly not Mr. Rushdie’s best, but remembered forever as having provoked a death sentence from Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini.
.. Mr. Wolff is known in New York and Hollywood for his withering takedowns of popular public figures; he was only ever going to write one kind of book... “Fire and Fury” is a typical piece of “access journalism,”.. Mr. Wolff takes the genre to another level, and perhaps a lower level. If he has employed objective criteria for deciding what to include or exclude, it’s not clear what those criteria are. By the looks of it, he included any story, so long as it was juicy... “Many of the accounts of what has happened in the Trump White House,” Mr. Wolff writes, “are in conflict with one another; many, in Trumpian fashion, are baldly untrue. Those conflicts, and that looseness with the truth, if not with reality itself, are an elemental thread of the book. Sometimes I have let the players offer their versions, in turn allowing the reader to judge them. In other instances I have, through a consistency in accounts and through sources I have come to trust, settled on a version of events I believe to be true.”
.. what to do when two sources make contradictory claims. A responsible reporter, or one more scrupulous than Mr. Wolff, would seek out corroborating evidence or do more research. Mr. Wolff simply “settles” on his preferred version... Mr. Wolff often writes as if he were the omniscient narrator of a novel... “Sessions was certainly not going to risk his job over the silly Russia business, with its growing collection of slapstick Trump figures. God knows what those characters were up to—nothing good, everybody assumed. Best to have nothing to do with it.”.. It seems unlikely that Mr. Wolff interviewed Mr. Sessions, and unlikelier still that the attorney general told him any such thing about his own thoughts on recusal. How does Mr. Wolff know then?.. Reporters, especially though not exclusively political reporters, are more interested in the meaning of facts than in the facts themselves. They’re concerned with interpretation rather than accuracy, with “narrative” rather than detail, with explaining rather than disclosing, with who’s happy or angry about a story rather than whether it’s true, with what’s likely to happen next week or next year rather than with what happened yesterday.
Another classically ‘Trumpian’ theme is the idea that, while the liberal international order has helped advance U.S. interests in some cases, it has also hurt the United States.
a Trump administration staffer who reviewed a draft of the document—and shared key excerpts with me—describes it as “divorced from the reality” of Trump’s presidency.
.. A few classically Trumpian themes are there—the wall, concern over trade imbalances—but much of the document reflects the values and priorities of the president’s predecessors.
.. These discrepancies render the document practically meaningless—enough so that it’s likely to be “widely ignored,”
.. In the end, Trump’s actions will matter far more than his words. And no matter how much fanfare this strategy document gets, foreign governments will likely continue to take their cues from the president himself.
.. broken into four pillars:
- defending the homeland,
- American prosperity,
- advancing American influence, and
- peace through strength.
.. It was spearheaded by Nadia Schadlow, senior director for strategy on the National Security Council (NSC). Schadlow is regarded as a conservative foreign-policy expert based on her experience in the establishment think-tank world, including stints at the Council on Foreign Relations and the Smith Richardson Foundation. She joined the NSC at Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster’s request
.. a section on promoting the rule of law is undermined by Trump’s own persistent attacks on the U.S. judicial system.
.. Trump’s NSS, like Obama’s, identifies the security of the U.S. homeland, particularly against terrorist threats and weapons of mass destruction, as a priority;
- both recognize that promoting economic prosperity is core to sustained U.S. global leadership;
- both highlight the value of preserving an open and liberal international order that has often times benefited the United States; and
- both underscore the importance of preserving core American principles and values.
.. The draft NSS also highlights “enhanced intelligence sharing domestically and with foreign partners” as a priority for disrupting terror plots. But Trump, through his own words and actions, has done much to undermine these relationships.
.. once accused the British intelligence agency, GCHQ, of helping the Obama administration wiretap Trump when he was running for president
.. He has undermined the rule of law repeatedly, personally attacking specific judges, the federal judiciary more broadly, as well as the FBI, the Justice Department and their leaders, some of whom he picked.
.. there’s been too much in the past year designed to stoke fear and sow schisms to make credible language of unity, however much I do crave such unity.”
.. Another classically ‘Trumpian’ theme is the idea that, while the liberal international order has helped advance U.S. interests in some cases, it has also hurt the United States.
Shep Smith and Sean Hannity live in different realities. That’s a problem for Fox News.
Smith and Hannity live in different realities, and that is a problem for Fox News. A division between news and opinion is standard — and healthy — at many media outlets, but facts and alternative facts cannot coexist.
.. In March, Fox News suspended legal analyst Andrew Napolitano for making an unsupported claim that British intelligence officials spied on Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign at the request of President Barack Obama.
In that case, as in the current one involving Clinton and Uranium One, it was Smith who set the record straight on his afternoon show.
.. This recent history would seem to bode well for Smith. When Hannity and Napolitano made assertions that were contrary to the reporting of others at Fox News, it was the pundits who had to back down or face a penalty.
.. “Were Fox forced to choose, it would choose Hannity over Shep,”
.. “The network has clearly placed its chips on Trump — witness the reshuffling of the lineup to highlight Trumpier voices, including Tucker Carlson — and you’d be hard-pressed to find a more pro-Trump voice than Hannity.”
.. “Rupert Murdoch highly prizes and highly pays Shep Smith because he brings credibility to the network. … Hannity gets away with a lot but also toes the line when he’s asked to.
Email to Trump Jr. Says Clinton Info Was Part of Moscow’s Trump Support
President’s son was told information would incriminate Hillary Clinton
The emails also appear to contradict statements by members of the campaign that they were unaware of a Russian effort to support Mr. Trump in the 2016 election. During the campaign and since his election victory, Mr. Trump repeatedly praised Mr. Putin and cast doubt on the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia sought to interfere in the election. Last week, he said in Warsaw: “Nobody knows for sure.”
In a July 24, 2016, interview with CNN, the younger Mr. Trump said the charge that Russia had mounted a campaign to help his father was “so phony.”